Just a quick heads up if you’re following here and not my mastodon account! I recently launched a new blog, Cooking Without Spoons. It’s a cooking blog, as might be obvious from the title, but the focus is on simple, delicious recipes that have minimal prep work and perishable ingredients. The primary intended audience is people with various mental health conditions, with an especial focus on executive dysfunction.

The Herbal Spice Problem

Long time no post, I know. This one’s mostly an announcement thingie! Last week (was it last week? oh gosh) I published a new PICO-8 game, The Herbal Spice Problem, which I made in conjunction with fluffy.

The teal-deer: The game is a puzzle game masquerading as a parody survival platformer. You’ve crash-landed on an alien planet and you really, really need a cup of tea. Explore the randomly-generated maps to find plants to brew, before time runs out.

My friend Alex posted recently on mastodon that they wanted to update their
comics
sites to add a “news” post underneath each page, and asked if anyone wanted to take a stab at the PHP for it.

So, I, having Copious Free Time[1], immediately volunteered to do this very trivial task. Which quickly turned into “redo the entire thing virtually from scratch so that it sucks less”. Anyway, so that happened, and I now have this big piece of PHP code for a very particular kind of lightweight comics website, and I am going to share it with the universe for anyone to use! Huzzah?

You know, I knew, going into the first question, that this question was coming. I knew it. But I could not in good conscience tell a lie, so the answer to this question is… well, it’s the same one. Whoops. (How many people who are doing this list have the same problem, do you think?)

Why oh why do these lists always have to pull out the favorites card? Aaargh!! Okay, fine, my first favorite… my first favorite book?! How do you even do that? The first time I read a book and went “this is my favorite book”, I guess…?

Someone over on mastodon posted this July Book Thing that they’re doing where each day of July you answer a book-related question, and it looks like a fun set of questions so I figured, hey! I should do this!

So here I have typed up all the questions in text format, because a) the image list format is annoying to reference, and b) what if that other person’s post gets deleted?? I’d lose ‘em all! The horror.

I saw the World-Building June prompt list thing floating around last month and was extremely
dissatisfied with the list of questions, so I decided I would write my own. It’s a little late
getting up, but… well, here we are!

Rather than trying to have a haphazard but encompassing list of questions about Basically Everything,
I took advantage of the month of June being 30 days and divided it into three general categories, with
ten questions/days per category. The questions themselves, I tried to make both specific and broad -
the kind of questions you can answer with just a brief sentence, or that you can expound upon in
detail.

Now, before you start actually answering the questions, consider the purpose of the world-building.
Is it just for fun, or is it for developing the setting of a story? The scope of your purpose will
help limit and direct your answers to the questions.

In the back of the two-room office, a telephone rang. The telephone was bright red - standing out in the dark, under-furnished office - with a rotary dial. It sat in the middle of the room on a simple, somewhat cluttered, wooden desk.

At the sound, the slim figure standing at the window turned towards the telephone, watching it quietly as it rang again, then a third time. On the fourth ring, he - or she, it was difficult to tell - finally stepped over to the desk and picked up the phone.

“Peregrine Falcon, detective for hire, what can I solve for you today?“

The code for my waiter bot script! Written to run in TinyMUX, using the Places system. It’s designed to work with the Money System from NarniaMUSH, but that can be easily tweaked to work with any money system where you can give an object an arbitrary amount of money. It also works as-is to use as a parent object.

Players need to be sitting at a place to call over a waiter. Once the waiter comes over to a table, anyone at that table can order. Bills are on an individual basis and there is currently no way to combine or pay for another person’s bill directly.

Alan let out a long breath, something between a sigh and a hiss, and looked at his assistant’s
concerned expression through the darkness. Trevor was new, and young; he could be forgiven a few
stupid questions at stressful moments, at least. He might even have missed the bullet hitting
Alan’s leg.